PIB: Published on 28 July 2026
India’s toy sector has undergone a sharp turnaround, shifting from heavy import dependence to net exporter status. Exports rose 89.1% to $384.7 million in FY 2025-26 from $203.5 million in FY 2018-19, while imports fell 37.5% to $232.3 million from $371.7 million over the same period. The change reflects coordinated government interventions on tariffs, standards, clusters, and design, rather than spontaneous market forces alone.
From Quality Crisis to Compliance Gains
In 2018-19, India imported $371.7 million worth of toys, many of them unsafe, substandard, or counterfeit. A 2019 mystery shopping exercise found only 33% of toys in the domestic market met Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) norms. By 2025, a BIS survey showed 95% of samples conforming; an unambiguous improvement tied directly to the Quality Control Order issued in February 2020 and enforced from January 2021. BIS has since issued more than 1,800 licences to domestic manufacturers and over 50 to foreign ones.
This quality reset, combined with a Basic Customs Duty hike from 20% to 60% in 2020 and then to 70% in 2023 (with a partial rollback to 20% on electronic toy parts in the FY 2025-26 Budget), raised the cost of cheap imports and created space for Indian producers. The sector has no dedicated national toy policy, yet a 21-point National Action Plan for Toys coordinated across 14 ministries has filled the gap by focusing on Indian cultural themes, cluster development, and innovation events such as Toycathon.
Manufacturing Base and Market Access
Support has been practical. The Ministry of MSME approved 18 toy clusters under SFURTI; the Ministry of Textiles is assisting 40 more with design and tooling. More than 700 startups have received DPIIT recognition, and over 2,200 exporters have accessed RoDTEP benefits. Preferential market access under CEPAs and FTAs with the UAE, Australia, EFTA, Oman, New Zealand, and the UK has opened duty-free or low-duty routes into key markets.
The 17th Toy Biz International B2B exhibition (4–7 July 2026 at Bharat Mandapam) illustrated the commercial payoff: 400 Indian brands, 100 buyers from 40 countries, and roughly 30,000 visitors. The event explicitly linked domestic manufacturers with wholesalers, retailers, e-commerce platforms, and institutional buyers, reinforcing both local sales and export pipelines. Major destinations now include the United States, United Kingdom, Netherlands, and Germany.
Structural Drivers and Remaining Constraints
The growth rests on three pillars: (1) tariff and standards barriers that filtered out low-quality imports, (2) cluster and startup support that expanded capacity and design capability, and (3) education-linked demand via the National Education Policy 2020 and NCERT’s Toy-Based Pedagogy handbook, which encourages indigenous toys as learning tools.
Yet the absolute export base remains modest at under $400 million. Global toy trade is dominated by large East Asian manufacturers with deeper scale, branding, and supply-chain integration. India’s gains so far are concentrated in volume recovery and quality compliance rather than premium global brand building. Electronic toy parts still face a lower duty, signalling sensitivity to input costs. Continued success will require sustained investment in design, intellectual property, logistics, and compliance capacity so that the 95% quality figure becomes a durable competitive advantage rather than a regulatory ceiling.
In short, the numbers show a policy-engineered rebound: imports down, exports nearly doubled, quality transformed, and the industry now a net exporter. The next phase will test whether these domestic foundations can translate into sustained, higher-value global market share.
